


My Violent Heart

by tiger_moran



Series: Song lyrics shuffle prompt fics [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angry Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Confessions, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Love, M/M, Minor Violence, Rough Sex, slight implied Holmes/Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 18:42:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3739342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiger_moran/pseuds/tiger_moran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes one’s most hated enemy is the one person who understands you the most.</p>
<p>A revelation of the truth of Holmes’s last encounter with Moran before the events of The Empty House.</p>
<p>(A song lyrics shuffle prompt fic, this one based on Nine Inch Nails’ My Violent Heart.  See notes for more details)</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Violent Heart

_“Ah, Colonel!” said Holmes, arranging his rumpled collar; “‘journeys end in lovers’ meetings,’ as the old play says. I don’t think I have had the pleasure of seeing you since you favoured me with those attentions as I lay on the ledge above the Reichenbach Fall.”_

     Not true, or at least declining to state the whole truth, of course, but then there would always be many, many occasions when Watson, in writing of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, would have to dissimulate, disguise or conceal information or, to put it bluntly, _lie_ to his readers, frequently to protect the victims and spare them further pain or humiliation but at times even to protect the guilty. There would always be many occasions also when faithful Watson simply did not know the truth of the matter and likely never would about some things. There remain some topics which one can simply never discuss with one’s Boswell.

 ~

_Then_

     He comes to the colonel when Moran is sitting amidst the muck and dust of an insalubrious French inn and contemplating the bottom of a glass. Moran’s focus is not the best at present but even so, as the image through the bottom of the murky glass coalesces into the face of his most hated enemy (despite the beard; the grime; the soft-brimmed hat and the hair of a length no decent man would sport back in England – the colonel sees through all these in an instant) his left hand tightens around the glass nearly hard enough to crack it. His right slips at once to where he keeps his revolver inside his jacket. His fingers brush the cool metal, ready to pull it and blow that bastard’s damned head wide open, all else be damned.

      But he does not, because of that look in Holmes’s eyes. Moran’s blue eyes meet Holmes’s grey ones and he sees that look of suffering that is almost a mirror to his own and he realises suddenly that to kill Holmes like this might be only putting him out of his misery, and to hell with that. There is no sport in putting down a wounded animal, only mercy, and Holmes does not deserve that. There is no _justice_ in it either. If Holmes suffers now, away from his doctor; his home; everything he holds dear, then _good_. Moran will not spare him that, not after the bastard took _everything_ away from him.

     He drops his right hand by his side and turns his attention back to his glass, gesturing with a nod of his head at the barkeeper for him to refill the glass.

     “Do you find solace in the bottom of a glass, Colonel?” Holmes enquires when the elderly man has refilled the glass.

     Moran grimaces and looks down into the glass once more. “Do you find any in your syringe, _‘Olmes_?” he sneers, not troubling to add the H and further, determinedly failing to prefix it with ‘Mister’. He glances at the other man for only the briefest moment; he does not need to look again to be sure. He saw something else in the detective’s eyes too – the slight dilation of the pupils that indicates it is not so long since Holmes last took a dose of cocaine. Perhaps that is why he has approached the colonel now; perhaps the drug makes him reckless, or perhaps… perhaps he simply no longer cares anyway if Moran kills him.

     “Do you think he would want you to drink yourself into a stupor each night?” Holmes asks, and he notices the clenching of Moran’s jaw after the colonel downs his next drink. “Do you really think that Professor-”

      “Don’t fucking say his name!” Moran snarls, spinning about and slamming Holmes up against the wall, his hands fisting in Holmes’s jacket. “Don’t you fucking say his name to me, you ain’t fit to utter it! You weren’t even fit to lick the ‘orseshit from his boots! You think you had any right to take him from me? To…” He seems to choke then, unable to say more, though whether it is grief or sheer fury (or both) that seizes his vocal chords is not entirely clear. His fists are clenched tightly around handfuls of Holmes’s dirty jacket, still pinning him there, though when he glances around and realises that everyone else in the dim room is now staring at him he shoves Holmes from him roughly and backs smartly away. Shoving his hand into his pocket, this time it is only a handful of coins he produces, slamming them down onto the scraped and sticky bar top beside his empty glass. “Merci monsieur,” he says brusquely before snatching up his hat. He strides from the bar, firmly looking at nobody and lets the door slam behind him.

     It is raining outside and it drips down off the brim of Moran’s hat, trickling down the back of his collar, as he tilts his head up towards the dark sky. He hated the rain once – used to complain about it frequently to the professor – but now he no longer cares; it doesn’t matter, as the water runs down his back; as it soaks into his clothes under his overcoat where he forgot to button that up; as it soaks his face. He closes his eyes and lets it wash over him for a moment, until the sound of a door closing behind him causes him to open his eyes and look around again.

     “I had assumed that… if I removed him,” Holmes says, standing in the slight shelter of the doorway for a few seconds, looking down at the muddy streets, rather than at Moran. “I might achieve a kind of peace.”

      Moran glowers at him in the flickering lamplight of the street but says nothing.

     “Yet I forgot to account for one significant point,” Holmes confesses, drawing his gaze up to meet the colonel’s.

     “Oh?” Moran says finally. “And what was that?”

     “My yearning to survive.”

     “Hah.” Moran laughs bitterly and turns his face away.

     “I believed that in bringing about the extinction of the most dangerous criminal in Europe I would achieve a fitting end to my career, but my career, Colonel Moran, is also my life. In short I had no expectation of surviving that final encounter with him; no plans beyond that point.”

     “And yet here you are,” Moran sneers.

     “And yet here I am.” Holmes smiles, sadly.

     “Perhaps you should have thrown yourself over the falls and had done with it,” Moran suggests, baring his teeth in a grim parody of a smile.

     “Perhaps I should have, but then I rubbed up against that same problem.” Holmes moves out of the doorway, strolling through dirty puddles, closer towards Moran.

     “Your ‘yearning to survive’?” Moran says scathingly.

     “Indeed.” Holmes smiles thinly once more. “Utter folly, is it not? It is completely illogical – that we should have such a strong and seemingly innate instinct to _live_ that we would endure, it appears, almost anything – any hardship; any suffering; even without any real hope of ever achieving any more, anything better – so long as we may _survive_.”

     “So you have no peace,” Moran says.

     “No.”

     “ _Good_ ,” Moran spits. “I hope it haunts you for the rest of your miserable fucking existence that you murdered the best and most brilliant mind you could ever meet.”

       Holmes looks down at his own mud-spattered boots now and from the faint little sigh he emits Moran knows he has touched a nerve here. After a second or two though he looks back at the colonel, understanding him too in turn.

     Moran will try to murder him again one day, he is fully aware of that. It is as inevitable as his last encounter with Professor Moriarty was. The colonel has very little left save for his fury, his capacity for violence and his desire to avenge his professor’s death and if Holmes returns to London yet, to _Watson_ , then he knows that he puts the doctor in grave danger. Better to keep Moran’s attention focused upon him for now, as deadly as this may be.

     But Moran will not try to murder him _tonight_. He understands this too, because there is still somewhere within him a cold-blooded cleverness about the colonel that will lead him to spare Holmes for a time simply to make him suffer more. Moran is no cat which customarily toys with his prey but for Sherlock Holmes he will gladly make an exception.

     “It had to be done, Colonel; he could not be allowed to continue.”

     Moran shakes his head fiercely, though perhaps less in disagreement; more simply as a warning for Holmes to keep back. “Don’t.”

     “Even you must understand that,” Holmes says, for Moran was an honourable soldier once, and is still no fool. “Even so…” Holmes continues to advance towards Moran. “I may still regret his passing.”

     “ _Don’t_!” Moran snarls through clenched teeth. “Don’t you fucking pretend like you care, like you grieve for him!”

    “It is no pretence, I assure you. I may still mourn the loss of such a unique and brilliant mind, even if-”

      Moran punches him swiftly and hard, the blow hitting Holmes in the chest and doubling him over. The detective falls to his knees, his hands splaying in the mud, and gasps for breath.

     He does not though make any move to protect himself, nor to retaliate. He only crouches there in the puddles, the water soaking him through. His tattered hat lies now half submerged in one particularly large pool of water in the pitted street. When he looks up Moran is still standing there, looking down at him, his right fist still tightly clenched, but he too is very still. He looks tense, every muscle straining, but even so he does not merely keep on battering Holmes with his fists. He seems instead to be waiting for something.

     “Even if,” Holmes continues at last, getting awkwardly to his feet again. His trousers, particularly around the knees, are sodden and stained with filth. “I cannot approve of the course he chose to take. I can still recognise his brilliance, Colonel; his genius for mathematics and astronomy, and lament his loss from the world.”

      “ _You_ put him in his grave, Holmes,” Moran spits. “Not I. Except not even a grave, was it? You took even that much from me! I don’t even have his body to bury because of you!”

     “I feel your loss, Colonel,” Holmes says, and Moran lunges at him.

     “Don’t you fucking dare try to make out you understand what he meant to me!” He crashes into Holmes, knocking him back against the wall of the inn, hands fisting in Holmes’s jacket once more. Water drips down more heavily close to the wall from an overflowing gutter and it spills over the pair of them. “Don’t fucking try to give me your sympathy.” Moran’s voice is rough and low against Holmes’s ear; his breath hot against his neck. The colonel’s face is so close to his; the colonel’s body is pressed close against his, warm and solid.

     “I am not… offering you sympathy, Colonel.” Holmes swallows. “Only… suggesting that I do have some idea of what he meant to you.”

     Moran laughs, and it is a terrible sound, that of one who has very nearly come unhinged. “You don’t have a damned clue!” He twists his face to meet Holmes’s gaze and Holmes looks into those deep-set blue eyes that look so dark now.

     Holmes eyes seem almost as dark here in the gloom, with his pupils dilated, and when Moran looks into his eyes he is forced to back away a pace because much as it pains him to grasp it, he sees that Holmes does understand, if only a little. Oh Holmes will never truly grasp what the professor meant to Moran; he will never be able to experience that devastating sense of loss that consumes the colonel now because of Moriarty’s death; he will only ever be able to mourn the loss of Moriarty’s brilliance, never his other qualities; never his other aspects, those he only showed towards Moran – his affection; his dominance that always, _always_ had winding through it a strong vein of tenderness and care; his sense of humour; the names he called Moran in private and the many and varied nuances of his speech that showed the depth and breadth of his regard for his lover; the warmth of his body nestled against Moran’s at night; the feel of his lips upon Moran’s; the way he looked when he came, and the look of serenity that settled over him afterwards, or when he slept. All of these things and many more are gone, consigned to a place for memories frequently too painful to recollect, and Holmes will never know of these. Even so… sometimes one’s most hated enemy is the one person who understands you the most. Even with the professor never convicted of anything, never even formally arrested for any crime, it seems always the world has been against him. Moran would be hard pressed to find many people who feel sorrow over the professor’s passing, even Moriarty’s own family. His elder brother seems only to care for the potential disgrace the professor’s demise may have caused the family and even his younger brother has remained distant from Moran. So then, even if Holmes cares more for the passing of a Moriarty who never was and perhaps never even could have been; even though he was the one who put the professor into that seething cauldron of water, the detective still laments his loss, and Moran despises him even more for that.

     What does he care for the sympathy, even empathy, from the murderer of the person he loved most in all the world? It only rubs salt into an already raw, stinging wound to have Holmes try to express sorrow over the professor’s end. It would easier to bear and far easier to know what to do if Holmes gloated over Moriarty’s death.

     “What do you want from me?” he asks gruffly. He had been pursuing Holmes, across countries, across borders, and yet now it seems things have shifted dramatically and it is Holmes who now pursues him for some purpose he cannot wholly grasp. “My forgiveness?” He says this in a sneering tone, one that does little to conceal how drunk he still is. Even inebriated though the colonel is, Holmes knows, a dangerous animal, liable to react with violence instead of merely collapsing in a heap on the floor. “For me to embrace you with open arms and tell you ‘well old chap, I know you threw the professor to his death but I understand how much that fact vexes you and as a result I don’t hold it against you’, or did you just want me to shoot you and have done with it so then you won’t have to go back and spend the rest of your miserable life reduced to seeking missing pets and unfaithful husbands, hmm?” He laughs again with great bitterness, yet perhaps not without some genuine amusement at this thought, which proves to Holmes that yes, indeed, Colonel Moran understands him.

     Watson would not understand, he thinks. Courageous, intelligent, loyal Watson, who has supported him through so much and has been the greatest friend Holmes could wish for, still would never be capable of grasping why there is a part of Holmes that regrets Moriarty’s passing and hopes fervently that somehow the professor may have survived. There is a queer sort of solace then to be found in the fact that Moran – though he may wish Holmes dead; though he is the dark and deadly mirror image of his own dear Watson – understands him.

      Holmes shrugs slightly, but he holds Moran’s gaze steadily. “I don’t want your forgiveness,” he says. He unconsciously licks his lips slightly, still watching Moran intently.

     Moran stares at him a moment longer than laughs sharply. “Good, ‘cos you ain’t getting it.” He spins away sharply, marching off down the street, his boots splashing water from the puddles.

     Holmes darts after him and draws level with him. “I desire no softer sentiments from you, Colonel. Only…”

     “Only what?” Moran asks, not letting up his furious pace, though Holmes, with his slightly greater height and long legs, has little trouble keeping up with him.

      “To know that we understand each other, at least to some degree.”

     “What I understand is you’re an infuriating busybody who couldn’t keep his beaky nose out of our business and you _killed_ the professor, and if you’re sufferin’ for it now then I’m glad.”

     Holmes finally falls behind, watching Moran move ahead of him for a few seconds, but then, as the colonel gets nearer to the door which leads into the house where he is currently staying, Holmes sees Moran slow down.

      He stops and stands there, rain still dripping down on him, bowing his head briefly. He does not look back; he gives no other sign that he is even aware any more that Holmes is there, but Holmes still follows him inside anyway, and Moran does not stop him.

     It is a single room dwelling, cold and cheerless, with yellowed, damp-stained paper on the walls and nothing but old ashes and the remains of a dead bird that had seemingly fallen down the chimney in the hearth. The sheets on the bed are dingy with age; the one chair in the room, probably upholstered in fine fabric decades ago, is now threadbare; the table which bears the single lamp is rickety and probably riddled with woodworm. There is nothing personal here; nothing that even attempts to make it a home rather than simply a room to stay in for a time. The place seems even grimmer, Holmes realises, than the room he is himself presently renting. It is a place Moran comes to when he has got himself drunk enough to hope to be able to pass out and sleep for a few hours, nothing more than that.

     The colonel ignores him while he removes his sodden overcoat and hat and tosses them onto the chair; while he lights the lamp with a hand which shakes, ever so slightly. Holmes notices that tremor, sure that the old shikari’s nerves are still sound; certain too that though he drinks, Moran is still far from being an incompetent drunk. It is not then fear or alcoholism that makes him shake so but something else, some other emotional reaction.

     Like Holmes’s, Moran’s appearance has deteriorated somewhat since before the professor’s fall. Not so far gone as to be repulsive, still his clothes are more crumpled and somewhat dirtier; his beard is a little unkempt and there are dark shadows under his eyes that speak of countless sleepless nights. Still meticulous in many of his habits in a manner that reveals his army history, it seems though that personal grooming has ceased to be a main concern for him.

     “Colonel.” Holmes moves to put his hand upon Moran’s arm.

      Moran lashes out at him swiftly, knocking his hand aside, but still he is controlled; still he holds himself back, keeping his most violent impulses in check. Instead of punching Holmes again he shoves him back against the wall, so Holmes’s back hits the damp wallpaper, and then he kisses him, fiercely and roughly.

     This is not an act of love; this is not even really about desire; this is about violence and dominance and possession, the colonel staking his claim over the man who wronged him so in a way he understands best and Holmes understands not really at all, and yet… Holmes kisses him back and draws his hands up Moran’s back; he draws Moran to him, rather than pushing him away. He comprehends sexual longing no better than the professor did but even so, there is something about this physical connection and whatever brief comfort it can provide that appeals to him.

     Moran is rough, of course he is, when he strips Holmes; when he pushes him down onto the bed with its thin, lumpy mattress; when he grips first his wrists, later his hips with bruising force. If one cannot have the person one loves then the person one hates most in all the world may be the only fitting alternative.

     Though this is indeed no act of love, neither is it an act of rape. Holmes expected, even wanted, nothing else but Moran’s sexual dominance. Perhaps this is his own strange way of seeking to make amends for destroying his most deadly yet most interesting rival – offering himself up to Moriarty’s right hand man to be used as Moran sees fit. The fact then that despite his aggression; despite his coarseness of language as he takes Holmes and the almost animalistic way in which he marks Holmes with bruises and bites that still the colonel is _careful_ in many regards seems perhaps not entirely welcome. If Holmes craved ruthless violence and pain to punish him then he is to be disappointed. Moran, for all his roughness, still troubles to ease the penetration with oil and careful preparation with his fingers. When he fucks Holmes hard into the mattress he still deliberately angles his thrusts to give Holmes pleasure too rather than taking it all for himself and he takes Holmes’s length in his hand, pumping it in time with his thrusts. Moran wants to see the detective come undone not through pain but from a surfeit of pleasure. It is, he thinks, a form of revenge in itself.

     There is an old speckled mirror, a cheval mirror long divorced from its stand, propped against the wall opposite the bed, and both can see their reflection in it, if they care to. Holmes, it seems, does not wish to do so but Moran glances at it from time to time, watching Holmes’s expressions; watching how the detective’s eyes slip half-closed when he directs his thrusts just right and how Holmes’s lips part in a near soundless gasp at such sensations as he seemed never to imagine possible being stirred within him.

     “You ain’t done this before, have you?” Moran says in a low tone in Holmes’s ear, before nipping sharply at the earlobe, causing Holmes’s eyes to fly open again. “What?” Moran asks with a slightly malicious laugh. “Your doctor never did this to you, hmm?”

     “Watson had…” Holmes tries to keep his voice level and composed, even as his long fingers clench into the faded sheets. “…other concerns.”

     “What, like his pretty wife?” The colonel laughs again at the slightly pained look that flickers, however briefly, across Holmes’s face. “ _Mary_ ,” Moran says; another spike of pain driven through the detective’s heart, to match those bullets Holmes may as well have fired through the colonel’s heart when he threw Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls.

      He catches sight of the pair of them over Holmes’s shoulder in the mirror again and it strikes him, not for the first time, that there is something about Holmes that reminds him agonisingly of the professor. Certainly they hardly look alike, save for their height. In so many ways their appearances differ: Moriarty’s eyes were a tad bluer; his hair was auburn, not this near-black shade of brown and he was not so lean nor so unhealthily pale nor were his arms scarred with needle-marks. Holmes’s hands too are rougher; his fingernails presently as chewed as Moran’s, whereas Moriarty always had such soft and well-manicured hands. But even so, beneath that haunted, pained look in the detective’s eyes, there is some spark of brilliance in him that reminds Moran inexorably of the professor, and it makes a sob catch in his throat.

     He tries to conceal this by dropping his head, putting his face against Holmes’s neck and biting his shoulder, but perhaps that only makes it worse, not better. He remembers keenly how sometimes the professor used to nip him during sex; he recalls the perfectly controlled violence of some of their intimate games; above all how, no matter what he did, the professor was always scrupulous about not causing Moran harm. He closes his eyes and, still nipping Holmes’s skin, breathes heavily, trying to will such recollections away; trying to focus on the here and now; on the warmth of the body beneath his; of the tight heat around his cock; on the fact that he _hates_ this man with all his heart.

     He should wrap his fingers around Holmes’s scrawny neck and choke the life out of him when he comes inside him. Or he should pull that knife he keeps concealed about him always and slit the wretched detective’s throat at the moment of climax. He should; he should hurt him, he should kill him, but he won’t. He knows that. He doesn’t want Holmes merely dead, he wants him to suffer, and Holmes hasn’t suffered enough, not yet.

     So he only bites Holmes a little harder as he strives for his orgasm. He only digs the fingers of his left hand a little tighter into Holmes’s bony hip as he pounds into him, and when he comes it is all he can do to keep from crying out _“James!”_ ; his breath hitching as he spends inside his hated enemy. Burying his face against the nape of Holmes’s neck to stop himself doing or saying anything foolish, still with his right hand wrapped around Holmes’s prick, still stroking him roughly but with enough skill and rhythm so that less than half a minute later, Holmes spills into the colonel’s hand.

      For some minutes neither speaks; neither moves, except for when Moran wipes his hand on an already dirty handkerchief. He has collapsed on top of Holmes, seemingly thoroughly spent, though Holmes can see when he looks in the mirror that Moran’s eyes are open. The colonel watches him intently still, suspicious and resentful as a wild beast caught in a trap.

  _“I love you,”_ Moran might have said to the professor after sex, not aloud but inferred in the comfortable post-coital silences; in actions too, in their soft gentle kissing; in the patterns traced seemingly idly upon the professor’s skin with his fingertips; in the way he tended to Moriarty’s needs after, ensuring he was clean and comfortable, and he had come to know too by the professor’s actions that his regard for Moriarty was returned, even if not precisely in kind.

     He has no need to say _“I hate you”_ aloud either now. The detective and the colonel understand each other if not as profoundly as the professor and Moran understood each other, then still well enough. Holmes too need not voice his feelings aloud for Moran to understand that the detective despises him – for what he was, that arch-criminal’s most trusted employee; for what he still is, a man perfectly capable of committing murder; for the fact also that as much as he may resemble Watson in some regards that he is not Watson. But then this was never about affection; this was only ever about some strange primal need deep within each of them to connect, however briefly during this strange temporary truce, with the one other person who could come closest to understanding them.

     With a sigh at last Moran rolls off Holmes, turning onto his side, uncaring if this puts his back to him. The detective would no more murder him tonight than he would murder Holmes, he would swear to that.

     When Moran makes no further move, Holmes finally heaves himself off the bed and on slightly shaky legs sets about trying to sort his still-wet clothes from the colonel’s own damp, discarded clothing.

     Moran glances over his shoulder at him, observing how Holmes seems not yet to have recovered his composure, which draws a sly smirk out of him. Probably the detective, for all that he seems to shun human companionship, truly wanted his first time like this to be something more special, far more tender, and with that doctor of his no doubt; where Watson would hold him afterwards and whisper sweet nothings in his ear. Moran was not so much second best but at the very opposite end of the spectrum of what he wanted, surely.

     The colonel’s revolver is still inside his jacket upon the floor. Moran has not forgotten this any more than Holmes has. He makes no move though to prevent Holmes from reaching down towards the gun or picking it up.

     “Go on then,” he says, and yawns before turning his back upon Holmes again. “Shoot me.” It is a dare; an invitation, even. Moran is not the suicidal type precisely as yet but he is tired – tired of not sleeping; tired of dreaming of watching the professor fall each time he does finally manage to fall asleep; tired of only _existing_ , for this is only a mere existence now. His life ended when the professor vanished down into the spray of the falls so what is it to him really if Holmes literally shoots him now?

     But Holmes will not shoot him, not like this; he knows that. As Moran cannot yet put Holmes down, neither can Holmes put him down, even though maybe their motives for refraining are entirely different. Holmes, Moran thinks, is not sure he would be able to look his precious doctor in the eye ever again if he shot someone in such a cold-blooded manner. More fool him.

     Holmes pointedly sets the gun down on the bed behind Moran before pulling on his shirt. “Do you ever wonder, Colonel,” he says, buttoning the shirt, “if he might have survived?”

      Moran makes no response to this.

     “It is highly improbable, I grant you, but not wholly impossible.”

      “I’d have thought even you, Holmes, would not be callous enough to try to give me false hope.” Moran does not look at him still; he seems calm, unmoving, and his voice is level. There is little about him that gives away any sense of anguish but it is perhaps the _lack_ of emotion with him, not its presence, that is most telling at times like this. “Just go.”

     “Well then,” Holmes says after pulling on his trousers and his scuffed boots. “Until we meet again then, Colonel.”

     Moran only grunts in response to this, affecting total disinterest. He listens but does not look for Holmes’s departure from the room. Only when he knows that Holmes has gone does he let out a wrenching sobbing sigh, curling in upon himself. It had seemed like a form of revenge and maybe it still was, him corrupting the hated Sherlock Holmes like that, but now afterwards he feels not triumph but only his loneliness and his isolation even more acutely. There is some comfort to be had in seeing how much Holmes is suffering too, but it’s a very cold comfort indeed.

     “James,” he says, twisting his head sideways, burying his face in the shabby pillow. “ _I’m sorry_.”

 ~

_Now_  

   “I’m sorry, James,” he says to Moriarty’s turned back. “I never did it to hurt you, I just… I s’pose he was the closest I could get to you.”

     The professor stands stiffly, silhouetted against the setting sun as he leans one hand upon the windowsill and has the other wrapped around the handle of his walking cane. He has remained silent throughout Moran’s account of what occurred between him and Holmes during that period that might perhaps best be referred to as _limbo,_ where Moriarty lived but was believed dead while Moran merely existed. When he is like this he is almost unreadable even to the colonel, and Moran is uncertain whether he should go to him or leave him alone entirely.

     “Professor?” When still this gains no response he bows his head briefly, glancing down at his hands pressed together in his lap. His worst fear in confessing all this to the professor was that Moriarty might construe Moran’s actions then as an act of spite against him, done to get revenge not on Holmes but on the professor for refusing to give up his feud with Holmes; for seemingly thinking playing with the detective was more important than his happiness with Moran; ultimately for leaving Moran alone. But for all Moran’s anger and resentment towards the professor back then; for all that he finds even his own motives for behaving as he did confused and questionable, he is sure he had not gone with Holmes to spite Moriarty.

     Once again he feels that heaviness in his heart, not quite akin to the sense he had when he believed Moriarty dead and gone, but still it pains him to think he may have caused the professor any distress; that he may even have irreparably damaged their relationship with his confession.

      The professor turns away from the window at last and gives Moran a weak smile. “You need not be sorry, Sebastian.” Moving awkwardly with a noticeable limp, leaning heavily on his cane, he shuffles back towards Moran and reaches up his free hand to brush a few strands of Moran’s hair back from his forehead.

     Moran drops his chin again, a gesture of submissiveness but also of acceptance of the gesture as the professor strokes his hair. “Sir…”

      “What occurred between you and anyone else during my time away was no betrayal.” Moriarty moves his hand down to cup Moran’s jaw, guiding his head up so he may meet Moran’s gaze. “You had every reason to think me dead.”

      “Professor.” Unable to bear his lover’s compassionate tone, Moran darts his gaze away from Moriarty’s. “It wasn’t just ‘anyone else’ though, was it? It was _him_.” He cannot bring himself to speak the name any more, perhaps fearful that to name him is to give Holmes the power to come between them once again.

     He thinks of Holmes as he saw him in that empty house opposite the detective’s rooms. Holmes hated him still, that much was clear from his taunting, and yet even so, Moran recalls how Holmes had looked at him still with compassion in his grey eyes. This had not prevented Moran from cursing violently at him as he was hauled away by the constables but then later, that last time he saw Holmes across that crowded court room, again they had shared, for one brief moment, a look not of mutual loathing but of understanding. It is something which he is certain did not escape Dr. Watson’s notice, and which he is equally certain that Holmes will never enlighten Watson about.

     “No matter.” Moriarty gives him another fleeting smile. “I understand, Moran; I do. You had your reasons, as I did for engaging in some manner of duel with the man. I would have been wise to have simply had him disposed of from the start but then _he_ would perhaps have been wise to assist the police further and not make things between the two of us so… _personal_. I do not believe any of us have behaved entirely rationally, not even Holmes’s dear doctor.”

     Moran snorts slightly at this. “That’s why Mary left him.” He grins, and a flicker of amusement seems to show briefly even on Moriarty’s face at this remark.

      “I will not make the same mistake again,” the professor says after a few seconds, sitting heavily on the sofa beside Moran. He pats the colonel’s knee gently.

      Moran leans against him, resting his head against Moriarty’s shoulder. “Do you forgive me?”

      “My boy, there is nothing to forgive.” Moriarty smiles again before kissing the top of Moran’s head. “If anything I suppose it is rather comic, do you not think, pigeon?”

      “What is?” Moran asks, as he experiences a surge of pleasure in his heart at Moriarty’s use of this pet name, and a swell of fierce love for this man too.

      “That you succeeded in bedding him. I had assumed he cared nothing for such matters.”

      Moran chuckles. “Maybe I’m just that irresistible.”

     “Indeed you are.” Moriarty slides his hand down over the colonel’s, linking his fingers through Moran’s. “My virile tiger. Forget Holmes, hmm? Do not trouble yourself over the past.”

     “Right sir.”

     “He is not important.”

     “Yes sir.”

     “ _We_ are important; you and I, Moran.”

     Moran glances up again, grinning wickedly now. “Yes Professor,” he says, smirking still as he nuzzles against his lover’s side. “That we are.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I used shuffle to randomly select songs and then tried to write a fic based on the lyrics of each.
> 
> From Nine Inch Nails - My Violent Heart
> 
> "There's bullet holes where my compassion used to be  
> And there is violence in my heart"
> 
> (The first paragraph is of course from The Adventure of the Empty House)


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